Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
chap's mind towards some sort of means to alleviate the sheer bloody awfulness of exist-
ence, via the ingestion of home-grown mood-altering substances if that's what it takes.
But enough about Glenfinnan's second greatest scourge. The rain's not that terrible,
after all; wear a jacket with a hood or carry a brolly and you'll be fine. The real question
is, What about those bastarding midges?
The midge: microscopic megascourge .
The highland midge (there are other types, but let's stick to the main culprit) is a tiny little
winged insect with the ability, en masse, to ruin evenings, days, weeks and entire holidays
for human beings. They are, basically, microscopic vampires; newly impregnated females
need a drink of blood to nourish the next generation of midges, and they seem to have a
preference for large mammals, especially large mammals with not much hair. Us, in other
words.
Really they're feeble, fragile little things, unable to fly faster than about six miles an
hour - so a modest breeze sends them to ground, and running away, if you can, is sur-
prisingly effective - plus they're damaged by bright sunlight, so tend to avoid that too.
Despite such weaknesses they have a powerful negative effect on the tourist trade of the
west of Scotland and on the quality of life of most people who live there. They'd ruin
the summer for the rest of Scotland too if they could, but they're only really happy where
the land receives more than about 1250 millimetres of rain per year, and in Scotland that
basically means the side that faces out into the prevailing westerly airstream.
They breed best in peaty, acidic soil with lots of standing water, they love still, over-
cast days and balmy evenings and they tend to appear between the end of May and the
start of September. And they are, collectively, voracious. The Highlanders of old had an
especially horrendous punishment which consisted of stripping the convicted person na-
ked and leaving them staked out overnight during the midge season. A midge will only
take about a ten millionth of a litre with each bite, so even after a few tens of thousands of
bites the victim was never going to be bled to death, but they did, allegedly, stand a very
good chance of going mad. Anybody who has ever been subject to a sustained midge at-
tack for even a few minutes - especially when they start to get into your eyes and up your
nose - will sympathise.
There are, however, two saving graces, one for people who only visit the Highlands
for short periods, the other for everybody. The first is that it's the body's own reaction
to the midge bite that distresses rather than the bite itself, and that reaction takes two or
three days to develop, so if you're only on the west coast for a weekend you may never
notice the damn things. The second is that some wonderful person has invented a midge
trap that actually appears to work. This device wafts out carbon dioxide - which is what
the midge homes in on, thinking it's the exhaled breath of a big, juicy mammal - then a
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